OK, thanks, I have a better feel for what you are trying to resolve.
Originally Posted by
Paul Cantrell
I was thinking more toward the Level D in terms of fidelity. You don't need 360 degrees of visuals - we don't have that in the real aircraft. The Redbird VTO has 200° of horizontal field of view and 70° of vertical field of view.
Some of the sims I worked with in the early 00's had about 240 deg horizontal. Completely agree that one does not need 360.
I would postulate that vertically, you need to see a bit above the rotor disk, and right down to the chin bubble. Horizontally, not sure -
FWIW, I'd toss 240 out as "good enough" but my experience is well over a decade old.
As for motion base, I read (but can't find) one of the Redbird execs saying they had to redesign the motion base in order to get the correct feel for a helicopter. My recollection is that it was the responsiveness that the existing fixed wing motion bases didn't supply - the helicopter needed a faster response time to give a correct feel.
Sounds similar to the upgrade we had to the Seahawk motion based sim in the early 90's: went to a digital control loader which very much reduced the lag; very much improved the feel.
Only one of the engineering simulators had a motion base (the 747 cab) the others were fixed and yet were totally convincing to fly (as well they should be - the test pilots got out of those sims and went and flew the real thing during certification).
Your test pilots were not ab initio, but the mix of PPT/non motions sims/motion sims is a methodology that works successfully, but is not cheap.
As for the simulation needing to be EXACTLY the same as the helicopter, I disagree.
I am with you. As an instructor, I found that the critical crew building tasks had to do with how the systems worked and interacted; if the bird didn't fly exactly like the aircraft, "close enough" seemed to allow us to transfer the needed skills.
I would assume that if you allowed 50 hours of sim and 5 hours of dual in the aircraft, that you would be covering exactly that during the 5 hours.
In what skill area? Instrument flying or contact flying? (Arrgh, the old notebook I had on some of the ISD stuff is long gone, I don't know why I recall a 1.7 : 1 ratio .... so I can't offer that to be of any use.
I interviewed with Evans & Sutherland back in the 80s when they sold visual systems for simulators for... it was either $10M or $20M at the time, just for the visual system. Now that performance is dwarfed with a single GPU, and systems like the VTO are running multiple GPUs... you can essentially scale the graphics as much as you want... several sims in recent years are using flat panel displays rather than projectors, so it's just a matter of how many panels you want to install...
Yeah, ain't technology great?
Similarly, motion bases are much cheaper since people have started using electrical, rather than hydraulic servos. Also, I would claim that for training in a basic helicopter simulator, you probably don't need heave/sway/surge, but simply roll, yaw, and pitch motions (if that).
That depends; what are you trying to teach? (We had an instrument sim that used mostly vibration and seat movement rather than the enormous box up on servos that worked pretty well ... but that tech is two decades old. I think you are in a good position to be checking out some of the newer stuff)
So the question is, if you can deliver a system like the VTO for $150,000 (and you assume those visuals and motion base are indeed good enough for primary training), then the question is how much the software to get Level D fidelity would cost? I think it's highly unlikely that you would need to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for the aircraft modeling software.
IIRC, helicopter modeling software is a lot harder than fixed wing modeling software, but again my info is well over a decade old.
I'm actually not all that skeptical of being able to learn to hover in a simulator, assuming you have wrap-around visuals. Learning to attitude fly is mostly a visual skill, learning how to move the controls so that you see what you want to see out the window. There are other cues that we all use of course, but the visuals are by far the most important.
Hmm, can't say, since my ab initio began in a helicopter, not in a sim. Once I already knew how to hover, hovering in various sims wasn't such an issue.
I've been teaching for 30 years.
OK, wasn't sure based on the OP. Glad to see you've been passing along to the next generation of pilots. Thanks.
Not sure if you're saying that's a lot or a little! Here in the US, the basic FAA minimums will run you about $13,000 for a PPL, but people usually end up closer to $20,000. If you assume you could rent a capable sim for $150/hr you could save the average guy money, or you could give him 120 hours of dual in the simulator, plus 5 hours in the aircraft which arguably would make him a better pilot. Or, perhaps 90 hours in the sim and 20 hours in the aircraft (which is, probably, more realistic).
Getting the mix right and the cost "right" (I presume the target is "lower" to equal "right" ) will probably take some trying.
The volume of flight ops per calendar period versus cost of this sim gets to be pretty interesting. Had an experience about 15 years ago with a "buy versus lease" sim decision (C-12) that needed to upgrade the visuals so that some early contact/landing pattern work could be down loaded into sims. The idea was great, the economics was, quite frankly, unable to show any savings and indeed was going to cost us more.
It looks as though you are trying out a 2:1 or 3: 1 ratio of sims to aircraft flying? Am I guessing that right?